


Let's Not Talk About It

by Unforgotten



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nightmares, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-23
Updated: 2018-11-23
Packaged: 2019-08-09 17:41:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16454435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unforgotten/pseuds/Unforgotten
Summary: A couple years after TWS, Bucky is doing okay.It takes a while for him to realize Steve might not be.





	Let's Not Talk About It

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rivulet027](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rivulet027/gifts).



Two years after he'd run and four months after he'd accidentally-on-purpose bumped into Steve again, Bucky thought he was doing okay. It wasn't a thought he ever expected to have, back when he'd first started figuring out how to be a person instead of a weapon; it hadn't even been on his radar back when nightmares had kept him up all night, every night instead of every once in a while. For a while there, he'd been dangerous, reactive, and it had been better for him to stay away from anyone who could have been important to him.

Things were better now. The nightmares had settled, for the most part. If he still kept more weapons on him than most people (an average of five, when he'd been told most people walked around with approximately zero all the time. Seemed crazy to Bucky, but what did he know?), he was less jumpy than ever, and there was less chance than ever that he'd pull a gun or a knife when he shouldn't. He remembered a lot more than he had two years ago, too, even though there were still plenty of blanks.

Most of the difference was just...time. He'd had the time to put himself together, to take a measure of what his life was now versus what it had been then. He'd had time to be a whole person, in weeks that followed months that followed years, without being interrupted. And, just lately, he'd had Steve. It was hard to believe how lonely he'd gotten without even knowing it until he'd had Steve. Steve, who'd used to know him, and who was willing to remind Bucky who he'd been, and at the same time willing to help Bucky figure out who he wanted to be now.

Things were okay now. Some days, they were even good. Every one in a while, there'd be a day that was downright great.

Bucky was doing okay, so it took a while for him to realize Steve might not be.

***

If he'd been looking for it, he later decided, he would have picked up on it sooner. If either of them had been the person they'd used to be, he would have. But Steve was bigger and stronger than he'd used to be; he'd used to go down at the drop of a hat, but he hadn't had so much as the sniffles over the last few months. As for Bucky, maybe he'd used to be the kind of guy to keep tabs on Steve while pretending he wasn't, but the kind of guy he was now was the kind who was involved enough in his own problems to take his old buddy at face value.

Bucky didn't realize how much of a mistake that had been until he passed by Steve's bedroom door one night and heard a sound. Little sound, quiet one—but weird enough that he reached for the door and opened it as silently as he could. Peeked his head in, ready to peek right back out if Steve were doing something that he needed privacy for.

But what he saw wasn't Steve jerking it, but Steve asleep, thrashing back and forth in the bed. Every few seconds, he'd say, "No, no..." In-between the nos, there were weird gasping sounds. Bucky had no memory of ever seeing Steve cry before, but there was no question that that was what he was doing now.

Bucky's first instinct was to wake him. He was halfway across the room to do it when he stopped again.

He didn't remember ever seeing Steve cry before...but he remembered seeing Steve in plenty of other embarrassing positions. Steve, getting beat up by the latest group of guys bigger than him he'd taken exception to; Steve, laid low by whatever sickness had come for him this week. Steve was fine with it if Bucky wanted to wade into the fray and kick some ass for him, but he was less good about gestures like Bucky asking him if he felt all right, or what he could do to help. If Steve being sick wasn't exactly the same as Steve crying in his sleep, those memories were the closest Bucky was probably going to get to figuring out what Steve's reactions would be here.

Maybe the guy Bucky had been before would have barged in there anyway...but the guy he was now watched for another minute or two, then beat it back outside the door. He stood in the hallway and listened until the sounds stopped, and the bed creaked like it did when someone sat up. Then he headed back to his own room, quiet as he could, and shut his own door right as Steve's door opened.

***

Bucky didn't get much sleep for the next week or two. He kept trying to figure out how to handle this; figure out what, if anything, he ought to do about it. He couldn't ask Steve, wasn't about to ask Steve's other friends, so in the end it took a lot of thinking through all the same ideas, hoping to eventually come up with a good one that wasn't the same fifteen things he'd already thought of and decided were no good.

In the end, he ended up doing most of his thinking out in the hallway after Steve had gone to sleep. Some nights, Steve slept peacefully...but on about two nights out of three, he didn't. Bucky spent those nights torn between options: wanting to go in, certain Steve would want him to go back to bed and equally certain there was no way he was going to do that. Steve would never have gone for that option, if it had been Bucky all but sobbing in his sleep.

(Sometimes, Bucky wondered if maybe Steve had held this same kind of vigil for him, when he'd first come back...but no. Bucky had learned silence decades ago, because to make any kind of noise or have any kind of a recordable reaction to things was just asking to get wiped even earlier than he would be anyway. The same rules that applied when he was awake also went for when he wasn't. He could scream in his nightmares all he wanted, but it wasn't going to come out any louder than a sigh outside of them. So if Steve had ever stood around outside of Bucky's room, it would have had to be more about Steve than it was about Bucky.)

During the days, Steve seemed basically the same as he had before Bucky had heard him. But now that Bucky was looking for it, he could see the strain in Steve's face when he smiled; he could see the circles under his eyes, and the way his attention wandered sometimes, when Bucky was talking about something that didn't need his full attention. He could see how quiet Steve got at times, when they were talking about the past.

Bucky didn't really know what was wrong, and he sure didn't know how to fix it, but he knew he had to do something. He could feel the need to take action growing and growing. If it had been a different kind of situation, he'd have shot whatever was causing it a long time ago and called it a day.

As it was, he obviously couldn't shoot Steve, and he had no idea what _else_ could do, and so one day, when he was right in the midst of worrying about it, he opened his mouth and heard himself say, "I've been having trouble sleeping, Steve."

Steve, who'd been in lala land while Bucky was trying to explain to him all of the features Steve didn't know yet about his Starkphone (Steve had never appreciated technology the way Bucky did; sometimes, despite his lists and all the things he knew about the future that Bucky didn't, it seemed like he didn't realize they were in the actual twenty-first century), turned to look at him, all concerned, like Bucky was the one they should be worried about. "What kind of trouble?"

"I don't know," Bucky said, which was true enough, considering he was making it up as he went along. "Tossing and turning all night long. Then the sun's coming up and I haven't slept more than maybe half an hour."

Other than the tossing and turning part, it was basically true he hadn't been sleeping; so when Steve looked at him, really looked, he must have seen the exhaustion. At any rate, he didn't look anything but sympathetic when he said, "Do you want sleeping pills, or something?"

Bucky already had sleeping pills. He had all sorts of pills, everything the doctors had thought he might need, all packed into the top drawer of his nightstand. (One or two of the doctors had suggested to Steve that he be the one in charge of Bucky's meds; if Steve hadn't balked at that one, Bucky sure as hell would have.) It was just that he hardly ever took any of them, which was fine as far as he was concerned since most of them said 'as needed' on the label.

"I don't think that's the problem," he said, because it sure wasn't the answer to Steve's.

"Well, do you know what it is?"

"I think I'm having trouble sleeping by myself," Bucky said. "Didn't we used to share? Back in our old apartment?"

"Yeah," Steve said slowly. "Yeah, we did."

"So maybe, if we went back to that..."

If their places had been reversed, Bucky would have done anything he could have to change Steve's mind. Not being found out would have been the most important thing to him. Steve, though, didn't hesitate, not even for a second: "We can try it. If you think it'll help."

"I really do," Bucky said, and had no idea how true that was.

***

Listening to Steve sleep right next to him was at least an improvement over standing out in the hall. For one thing it was warmer; before they'd gone to war, Steve had always had poor circulation in addition to everything else, but apparently they'd turned him into a furnace around the same time they'd made him big. For another thing, it was comforting, having Steve right there, automatically knowing what he was doing without having to keep an ear to the door. Pretty soon, though he'd meant to stay awake, Bucky managed to fall asleep so completely he didn't even realize it was going to happen until he opened his eyes and found it was morning.

Steve had gotten up already, but he couldn't have been up for long; the big hollow on his side of the bed was still warm. Before Bucky could get up to find him, the shower hissed on across the hall. A minute after that, Steve started whistling. It was pretty much all Bucky needed to hear to know Steve must have slept pretty well, too; and he'd already known Steve hadn't cried during the night, because there was no way he could have slept through that.

The next few nights were like that, too. Bucky would fall fast asleep without meaning to, lulled by Steve's breathing and Steve's heartbeat and Steve's body heat. He'd stay asleep all night, and in the morning they'd both be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

Bucky was sure it couldn't last forever—no one just _stopped_ having nightmares, if they'd been having them for a while; he was probably due for his next one any day now—but the next thing that happened wasn't what he'd expected.

It did involve a dream, but it wasn't Steve's, and it wasn't a nightmare.

***

Bucky was in the middle of it when something shook him out.

"Bucky," Steve said urgently.

Bucky cracked his eyes open to find it was dark, still the middle of the night. Wasn't like the dark he'd been in just a moment ago; there weren't any shadows moving together, slipping in and out of each other...

"...Steve?" Bucky said.

"You all right? You were having a nightmare or something."

Bucky took a second to take stock. That was all the time he needed to know a couple of things: that what he'd been dreaming hadn't had a damned thing to do with Hydra, or the war, or anything else Steve might be thinking; and that he was pretty much as hard as he'd ever been, because of what he'd been dreaming. It hadn't even been anything all that _good_ , but it hadn't needed to be; it had been so long since he'd even thought about sex that pretty much anything would have done it for him.

"Yeah," he said. "I'm fine."

He turned onto his back so he wouldn't accidentally poke Steve with his hard-on. The tent it made then was way too obvious, so he turned onto his other side, so his back would be to Steve. Then he tried to remember how they'd handled this kind of thing, back in their little apartment that had only had the one bed. One or the other of them must have had those sort of dreams sometimes, back then. They'd probably had to deal with a lot more morning wood, too, being young guys. What had they done about it? Bucky couldn't remember anything specific, which probably meant one of them had hidden it miserably, while the other one pretended not to notice (or maybe _actually_ didn't notice, like Steve didn't seem to have noticed anything now).

Whatever they'd done about it back then, you could bet they hadn't thought about reaching down and taking care of the problem. Not while lying right next to the other. Didn't matter if it had been literal years—and, probably, decades—since Bucky had gotten off. He didn't even want to think about what Steve would think about this. Maybe he wouldn't even say anything—maybe all that worrying he did about Bucky would extend to not saying anything—but Bucky couldn't stand the idea of having to live with knowing Steve wasn't saying anything. So he just lay there, waiting for Steve to go to sleep so he could slink off to the bathroom and take care of it.

Eventually, Steve did go to sleep. And when he did, he also rolled over, so that his arm nudged against Bucky's back. That was all he did, and that was all it took for another bolt of arousal to stab through Bucky. His erection hadn't flagged even a little bit while he was waiting, but now it was even more at attention than it had been. And suddenly, the vaguely sexual shadows from his dream that Bucky had been trying not to think about had become a very un-vague him and Steve.

Bucky bolted from the bed. Steve had to have woken up when he did—they'd both been soldiers, and neither of them was going to sleep past a commotion like that—but if he asked Bucky where he was going, Bucky didn't catch it. He was too busy rushing to the bathroom, looking the door behind him, and turning on the faucet. That was what he always did when he had to throw up; so if Steve had been woken up when Bucky left, he'd assume that's what was going on, and would know better than to follow or try to listen.

It gave Bucky the privacy he needed to take care of things in private. Once he was finished, he wiped himself off, flushed the toilet, and said, very firmly, "That's not going to happen again."

***

And the thing was—it didn't. Maybe it was because he didn't want to lose Steve, or maybe it was just because he'd learned a long time ago how to control himself. Whatever it was, three more weeks went by without Bucky having any more of those dreams. Or at least not ones strong enough that Steve had to wake him up in the middle of the night. Every once in a while, he'd wake up itching all over, but all that meant was that he had to take an extra-long shower that morning (without thinking about Steve, because if Bucky had spent all this time trying to remember things, he had a pretty good handle on how to forget them, too).

It didn't happen again, and if it had all been up to Bucky, nothing else ever would have happened.

But that was before Steve had another one of his own dreams.

***

For the first second after Bucky woke up, he couldn't remember where he was, and had no idea what the sounds were. In the second after that, everything slotted together, and he looked over and saw Steve, a shadow rolling back and forth in the bed, crying out. Wherever Steve was right now, he wasn't having a good time.

When Bucky had just listened to him, out in the hall, he'd never been sure what to do, or whether to do anything. Now, he still didn't know for sure, but up this close, there was no way he could do nothing. So he reached over and shook Steve, and said, "You're dreaming, Steve. Steve, wake up."

After a couple seconds of this, Steve said, "...Bucky?"

Here was where the shouting would start, Bucky figured. Followed by the crabbiness, and the 'I was just fine without you sticking your nose in,' and the Bucky moving back to his own room. Well, it had been worth a shot, anyway. "Yeah."

"I had the worst nightmare, Buck," Steve said, instead. "I dreamed we were in the future, and almost everyone we'd ever known was dead."

Bucky would have given a lot not to have to say what he had to say, in response to that: "That happened, Steve."

Steve was quiet for a minute, for what felt like another century. Then he said, in a dull voice, "Yeah. I guess it did."

"You all right?"

"Fine," Steve said shortly—but he didn't tell Bucky to go away, or even to stop touching him. Bucky stayed where he was, and left his hand on Steve's shoulder, too.

After a minute, there was another sound, a quieter version of what Steve had sounded like when he was asleep. Took Bucky a second to realize what he was hearing; took him another few to figure out what to do about that. He wrapped his arm around Steve—very glad that it was his right arm, and not the other one—and to his surprise, Steve didn't hit him.

A couple minutes later, after Steve had calmed down, Bucky had figured out why Steve hadn't hit him yet. It was because Steve couldn't. Because Bucky was the only thing he had left out of the past that seemed much closer to him than it did to Bucky. To Steve, the world back then was just a couple years ago; to Steve, the war they'd fought in all those years ago had not so much ended as been cut short. He probably still halfway expected to be able to go back to their old neighborhood and wave to all the people they'd known.

For Bucky, the issue wasn't so much that he didn't remember, as that what he did remember from back then seemed really far away. Unlike Steve, he'd had time in-between, and enough of it that he wasn't really concerned with anything but what had happened recently, or was likely to happen in the near future. The only reason Steve seemed that real to him was that Steve was _here_ , unlike Bucky's parents or his sisters or any of his other friends or girlfriends. Maybe those days were closer than they would have been for someone who hadn't been frozen for a few years here or there, but they didn't exist for him the same way they did for Steve.

"I didn't know—" Bucky began, then stopped. 'That you were still upset about that'? 'That you were still grieving'? First of all, even a guy who'd had to relearn how to be a person could figure out that you didn't say something like that. Not out loud. Second of all, he really should have known, after all the times Steve had visited Peggy, after how quiet he always was, later the same day. If Bucky said enough stupid-ass things, Steve may as well throw him out of the bed in self-defense.

Third of all, he never really got a chance to figure out how to finish what he'd started saying, because that was when Steve kissed him.

It was the last thing Bucky had expected him to do, and so for a moment he froze, taking in this new information. Then, because Steve seemed pretty determined—and because Steve kissed exactly the way Bucky would have thought he would, if he'd ever thought about it at all, or let himself think about it: like he was throwing down a glove, like it was a challenge whoever was on the other end of it should rise up to meet—Bucky decided the only thing to do was his own part, and kissed him back.

Didn't take long for the rest of him to catch up to what was happening. Took even less time, once he realized that Steve meant to keep it going, for him to decide: to hell with it.

***

In the morning, Bucky woke up alone, with a distinct feeling of 'did that really happen?' One glance at the state of the sheets told him it had. Him and Steve, grappling together in the dark. At the time, Bucky had thought Steve was determined, but now that he'd had more than two hours of sleep, he thought maybe Steve had just been desperate. The kind of desperate people sometimes went for, when things looked really bad; the kind they didn't want to think or talk about, after.

Bucky hadn't really been expecting a good morning kiss or anything, but when he caught up with Steve in the kitchen and Steve wouldn't look at him, he began to think maybe this was going to be worse than he'd thought.

"Morning," he said, in case Steve just hadn't noticed him.

Steve grunted, then left his breakfast on the counter and went into the other room.

Okay, this was definitely going to be worse than he'd thought. Steve had been attentive to Bucky ever since he'd shown up on Steve's doorstep. There'd been days, especially in the beginning, when Bucky's existence had seemed like a good enough reason for Steve to hover. Steve trying to avoid him wasn't something that happened. Not in the twenty-first century, anyway.

Well, that was just shit.

Bucky followed Steve into the living room.

" _You_ kissed _me_ ," he said, before he could get around to deciding if he should try to be more sensitive, all things considered. "You started it. So whatever this is, you can stop it right now."

Steve looked at him. His eyes were pink; he looked even more miserable than Bucky had imagined he'd looked last night before all the kissing and stuff.

"We can pretend it didn't happen, if you want. Or we can have a big old fight about it. Your choice. But we're not going to do this."

Steve looked at him for a few more seconds, then took a deep breath, and said, "I took advantage, and I shouldn't have. I'm sorry, Buck."

Bucky would never have guessed Steve's weird reaction had anything to do with guilt. He hadn't known Steve was even acquainted with that emotion. At least not when it came to anything he'd done that he had any control over.

Maybe it made sense, though. This was _Steve_. Of course he'd rather make it all about Bucky rather than just admit he'd been the one who'd been vulnerable.

"What makes you think you could do a single thing to me I didn't want you to?" Bucky said, figuring it was better to lean into this than push the other thing. "And what the hell makes you think I'd still be here right now, if you had? If anyone took advantage of anyone, that was me taking advantage of you."

There it was now, the expression on Steve's face Bucky had been looking for, all this time. "I make my own decisions, Buck."

"Me too," Bucky said, and rolled his eyes a little, and walked up to Steve and kissed him, just to prove...well, he never was all that sure, but it turned out okay, because Steve kissed him back, and they ended up on the couch, and by the time they were done there, Steve wasn't too worried about whether Bucky was okay with putting his mouth on Steve's goods, and Bucky was less worried than he had been about Steve's dreams.

***

A few nights later, Bucky had the first nightmare he'd had since he and Steve started sharing a bed again. A few days after that, he had to shake Steve awake from another one of those dreams about the future that was actually their present. Things weren't perfect, and maybe they never would be...but even though they didn't really talk about any of that except in the darkest part of the night, things were better than they'd been when they'd both been trying to go it alone.

Bucky thought he was doing okay, all things considered; and when you got right down to it, he thought Steve was going to be fine, too.


End file.
